The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recommends that all governments assess the impacts of their legislation, policies, programmes and budgets on children as part of their obligations to fulfil children’s rights as set out in the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC). However very few governments have attempted to institute a regular process to do so. This likely owes in part to the absence of a suitable and accepted tool or process to carry out such an assessment, as well as a lack of a deeper understanding of what it really means to have an ‘impact’ on children’s rights and how to predict or measure such an impact.
This concept note sets out the main issues to be considered in preparation for the development of a Child Rights Impact Assessment (CRIA) to enable governments, donors and other stakeholders to identify and address the potential impact on children’s rights of new laws policies and programmes. The CRIA is part the Child Rights Toolkit being developed by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) with the support of the European Union (EU). The Child Rights Toolkit will bring together a series of tools to be used by governments, donors and other stakeholders to enable them to identify and address child right issues in their work and to better integrate children’s rights into a whole range of relevant political, legal, budgetary and programmatic actions and structures.